I was listening to Marketing Over Coffee a few weeks ago and heard a sad tale of woe from co-host John Wall. His blog, Ronin Marketeer, was down for four days. Hosed, in fact.

Literally.

On February 20th, there was an an accident during the annual inspection of the fire-suppression system at WestHost’s data center. If you rewrite WestHost’s account of the incident in the active voice, it amounts to “The vendor forgot to remove an actuator before the inspection, and this triggered a release of Inergen all over the data center.”

According to Wikipedia, Inergen is non-toxic…to humans. It is, alas, highly poisonous to computer servers. And John’s blog just happened to be on one of the worst-affected machines.

Bye-bye blog.

The good news is, WestHost actually had backups of its clients’ sites. Not all hosting companies actually back up your website for you. (You can usually make your own backups through the control panel, but you may or may not be able to automate this process. Of course, if you have a traditional HTML site and edit the files on your computer before uploading them, you should be able to back up your local versions easily.)

The better news (theoretically) was that John, being a smart guy with lots of IT experience, had recently made his own backup of his blog. That meant he was starting out in better shape than Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror, who had to rely on other people to piece together bits of his lost blog for him.

But the first attempt to restore Ronin Marketeer left a bit to be desired. When I sent a sympathetic inquiry to John after hearing the podcast, he sent me a link to a post he had titled “When Even a Backup Is Not Enough.”

As you can see, everything is all f’d up here.

Over a week ago disaster struck at my hosting company, during a fire alarm test the suppression system was triggered, hosing all the servers. This blog was dead for a full week.

We were offered to move our hosting from the version 3 infrastructure to v4, and I took up the offer since it got my domain back 2 days earlier. Unfortunately the new environment is not the same – even though I have a full backup of my Database that supports this blog, the new system does not allow you access to the directory where that data is kept.

I’m no expert in MySQL, but it looks like I’ve gone from having my own instance to sharing one on the server with everyone else.

The end result is that all my archives are gone for now and my Google juice vanishing as there’s no access to any of my archives. It looks like my only path is to install WP and MySQL on a box of my own, then do a WordPress export so I can then import it back in. I cannot believe that having the actual files is not enough for me to do a restore.

“My god,” you may be thinking. “If having the backup is no good, why bother making one?”

But if he hadn’t had the backup, the story would not have had a happy ending, and it does. John had to do some heroically geeky things, but he was able to get the blog back up and running. He did lose some comments, probably due to the nature of the restore process, but everything else seems to be intact. John started Ronin Marketeer in November 2006, and he’s a pretty prolific blogger. It would have been a serious loss, and no fun to try to reconstruct from the Google cache and the Wayback Machine.

I’m betting John will be especially interested in the WordPress backup plugin I’m going to be writing about next week. Everyone else certainly seems to be, and I’m very impressed so far.

Our three winners in the CloudBerry Online Backup giveaway contest are:

• Larry H., who will be using it to back up his business data.
• Ty Taylor, who has some higher education and training presentations and video files to back up and synchronize.
• Tim Larson, who needs to back up all the photos and videos of his kids on his Windows Home Server.

Thanks for participating, guys, and good luck with your backups. Keep an eye out for future contests here on the Backup Blog.

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from my stepmother, who converted to Mac some years ago when she left the corporate world. As I wrote back in November, she brought my father into the Apple fold after his retirement.

For the most part, they are very happy with their Macs, but sometimes trouble rears its ugly head in paradise. Though Macs are well-constructed pieces of hardware, they’re not immune to drive failure—and some of Apple’s products exhibit other flaws. “You might be interested in writing about Time Capsule failures,” Pam wrote.

I was totally unaware of this problem until mine died on Friday as it had been operating flawlessly up to that point. It was not until I did the usual round of troubleshooting per the manual that I Googled time capsule failures, to know that I was not alone. I am off to the store today to get my replacement time capsule, but word on the net is that Apple still has not fixed the underlying flaw so now I am looking at a second backup drive or cloud backup as I can not rely on Time Capsule. If you Google “time capsule power failure”, you will find lots to write about.

Indeed, if you search for “apple time capsule power failure” (without the quotes), you get (at the time of this writing) 114,000 results. A November 2009 article from the Guardian includes a nice graph pegging the average life span of a Time Capsule at 535 days:

The problem is not disk failure, but the power supply. Theoretically, the data on the unusable Time Capsules could be fine, but you can’t get to it.

Frustrated Time Capsule owners have created websites like AppleTimeCapsule.me, which provides warranty-voiding tips on how to prevent your Time Capsule from croaking. (Warning: in addition to voiding your warranty, this solution requires power tools, or sufficient muscle-power to put holes in metal casings without power tools.)

And then there’s the now-famous, only-half-joking Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register.

Once the number of dead time capsules reached 2500, the site stopped accepting new submissions. That doesn’t mean Time Capsules have stopped dying, but Apple has improved its replacement policies.

Pam described her experience this way:

Got my replacement for my Time Capsule—a refurbished Time Capsule. I was told that if it fried again I should bring it back for another replacement. I asked the Genius what Apple was doing to fix the problem and he said that I would need to call Apple. When you take the time capsule back they plug it in with your plug and then their plug and when it does not power up, they just hand you the replacement.

Can anyone spot what Apple left out of this resolution? That’s right: what about your data? Your presumably still intact, possibly entirely confidential data, now in the hands of the “genius” behind the counter at the Apple store. Well, apparently, that’s not Apple’s problem.

Both the websites I mentioned above offer some suggestions, however. The memorial site has a “Now What?” page that breaks down your options into Replace, Repair, and Do nothing. (Hmm. Anyone remember “Abort, Retry, Fail”?) “Replace” is what Apple will help you do. For “Repair,” you either need to be something of a hardware geek, or to hire one. The site points to a list of Time Capsule repairpeople around the globe, but it’s a short list. Any competent computer hardware repair person should be able to get your disk out and put it into another drive case, though.

AppleTimeCapsule.me suggests taking your TimeCapsule disk out before returning the case for replacement, then putting your own disk into the new case instead of using the one provided to you. This is possibly not quite honest, but then again, neither is Apple’s just taking your data.

It would make more sense to me if Apple just provided you with a new empty Time Capsule case and stuck your existing disk into it, especially if it’s clear that the point of failure was the power supply. Admittedly they don’t look all that easy to take apart and reassemble, but it seems as though the company might need to address the design anyway.

Meanwhile, as convenient as a Time Capsule is, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to make it your only backup device. What do other Time Capsule owners out there use to back up their Time Capsules (or their Macs) with? Is there a favored external hard drive maker? A most popular online backup provider? Inquiring minds want to know.

Backup bookmarks for February 18th through March 1st:

• Online Backup For Wordpress – Plugin to backup your blog –
• Comcast Unveils New Online Backup Service | Gather – For those who want to increase their chances of hitting their broadband caps, Comcast has announced an online backup service, free if you want just 2 GB of storage.
• Business and IT Disagree on Disaster Recovery – IT Management –

Seagate’s i365 is holding a “Be the Hero” disaster recovery webinar on March 11, 2010 from 10:00-11:00 AM Pacific. This is oriented a bit more toward the enterprise than the SOHO user, but I thought I’d put the link here anyway. Disaster recovery is a useful thing to know about, after all.

Here’s the copy from their registration page:

If and when a disaster strikes you want to be the hero, not the fall guy.  This workshop will help you prepare to be the hero:

• Differences between data protection and disaster recovery
• How to secure organizational buy in for a disaster recovery program
• Specific factors to consider in creating a disaster recovery plan
• Real life examples of preparing for disaster and balancing priorities

Janson Hoambrecker, Manager of Disaster Recovery Services, is the featured speaker for BE THE HERO Disaster Recovery Workshop . Janson has been leading i365’s EVault Disaster Recovery Service team for many years and has helped hundreds of customers properly prepare for a disaster.

i365, which used to be EVault, has its headquarters just down the street from me, in Emeryville, California; their data recovery branch is in Santa Clara.